there are 300 hours of video uploaded to youtube every minute, 60,000 tracks to spotify every day, and 1.09 billion websites in existence. woah.
the amount of creative work uploaded to the internet in a single day could span multiple human lifetimes. hours and hours of content with varying degrees of importance and value. some of it is marketed to you, but most is not. certainly most of it will get consumed by someone, someday, somewhere. writing all of this down and trying to quantify its scale is dizzying for me.
it’s not too different from trying to make sense of your cosmic importance in the grand scheme of everything. the planets in rotation, the years and years of human existence. the far greater years of non-human existence. yet, in the last 100 years or so we’ve managed to create this behemoth of recorded history. for perspective, the first commercial audio recording is from the 1920s.
i bring all of this into perspective because this oversaturation of created works really wears against my justification for creating anything at all. there’s so much out there, and much of it is far, FAR better than I’ll ever accomplish. or, what’s the point in just adding more noise to the world? and this is before considering the algorithm, the process of a machine tagging and filtering your work to the world. forget the cosmos! How could you ever make a splash in an ocean of content?
the one thread of hope that keeps me from being totally consumed by a sense of futility is that in vulnerable, creative work, there’s a flicker of meaning. In this type of aching, painful expression of an artist’s self, there’s some level of the human spirit nestled there. these don’t always have to be negative feelings either. but i feel, to some level, that the mix of individual and collective consciousness that is murky within us and makes us human is the same magic that makes art… well, art.
the other aspect of this magic is time. allowing the natural expression of self to evolve over time adds another dimension to this sense of meaning. think of your favorite band. remember their first album? their 3rd? their 5th? how did the changes affect you? just the other day i read the full wikipedia page for the red hot chili peppers, and woah that was a trip. but their creative highs (imo californiacation) have another layer of meaning when you zoom out and see where that album fits in their discography.
for now, i do have something i want to show you! this is technically handsigns first “release,” a submission to the 2024 tiny desk contest. this is one of over 6,600 submissions, and only 2 minutes of the 600 hours of video uploaded within a single minute on youtube, but it’s also a little anthem to meaning for me. enjoy “stairs.”
-logan